GWWC London Group Co-leads: Reflections on our first event

By Chris Rouse, Gemma 🔸 @ 2023-12-02T15:34 (+39)

Hello from your GWWC London Group 2023/24 co-leads.

We’re excited to be one of the GWWC groups relaunched under Giving What We Can's new community strategy. 

We (Gemma Paterson, Denise Melchin and Chris Rouse), are all volunteers with non-EA day jobs who are keen to help achieve GWWC’s mission of making giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm.

Giving is often done privately and while there’s nothing wrong with that, we hope that GWWC London and groups can make it easier for people to connect to a larger community of people who care about doing good effectively through giving. We know first hand how re-affirming it is to meet and get to know some of the many wonderful people who are doing the same thing. 

We’re looking forward to hosting a variety of events throughout the year from Talks & Discussions to pub socials to picnics to pledge celebration events for GWWC members. 

Most of our events are open to anyone who is interested in using their resources effectively to help others, and we actively encourage new attendees, and for existing members to bring friends along.

Our end goal is to facilitate sustainable lifetime pledges and donations to highly effective charities but hopefully we’ll have some fun along the way.

• Sign up for our mailing list to hear about future events here
• Join the GWWC community slack here 
• If you have questions or you’d be interested in collaborating on an event with us, please reach out to us at london-group-leaders@givingwhatwecan.org 
• If you’re interested in seeing a GWWC group in your city, you can apply to lead a city group here 
  • We’re biased but think this is likely a pretty impactful volunteering opportunity for personable pledgers that are passionate about effective giving 
  • We would be happy to have a call to talk about our experiences 
• UK based pledgers are invited to join us on Saturday 9th December at the Charity Entrepreneurship office for our GWWC London Pledgers Holiday Party 2023 🎊
  • If you can’t make it then please feel free to still donate to the associated GWWC/CE fundraiser 😉

Reflections on Giving What We Can London’s first event

Earlier this month we held our first ** official ** event for the Giving What We Can (GWWC) London group! We’d like to thank Newspeak House for generously hosting us in their lovely venue. If you would like to find out more about their work and the other events they host you can find them here: https://newspeak.house/

At relatively short notice we had just over 30 attendees join us for the informal launch and we were delighted to meet and chat with some of the London effective giving community. 

The evening had quite minimal structure but we started with a short introduction to the group and a pre-recorded talk from Grace Adams (Marketing Director, GWWC). The talk was “The future of EA relies on Effective Giving” which was an ideal subject. In hindsight, although the theme was great, watching a pre-recorded talk was not very engaging and we will plan to have live in-person speakers for any talks we hold in the future. 

The rest of the evening was free time for attendees to meet and chat. The atmosphere was friendly and relaxed and I had a series of interesting conversations with different guests. We may introduce themes of some kind in future to help guide conversations but overall I was pleased with the atmosphere of the event. 

If you attended the event and have any feedback for us we’d be grateful to receive it. You can submit that here: Feedback form 

Our next event will be a holiday pledge celebration for GWWC members on the 9th of December, find out more and sign up here: Pledge Celebration Event.